During refueling operations, the fuel is filtered by a filter/water separator or a monitor filter. The quality of fuel that is being supplied to aircrafts must fulfill the intoplane quality standards, and therefore fuel-cleanliness management and measurement becomes necessary. On the other hand, in fuel storage terminals and pipelines, monitoring the particulate matter and free water content in fuel is also desired as fuel quality can effect the overall performance of or result in wear or damage to down stream systems that use the fuel; therefore measurement of particulate matter and free water is required during fuel handling operations.
Conventionally, the aforementioned measurements are made manually in situ that is in the place of application, though without having any control of the quality of the fuel intoplane, or other device, or acquiring records of the fuel quality continuously. This fact produces objections due to the difficult administration and monitoring of the required operations. Typically, the measurements must be performed on fuel that is removed from the flow of fuel into the supplied device. However, this fuel cannot then be added back into the flow of fuel and must be discarded, which results in a significant and costly loss of fuel. In many instances, the fuel must be shipped to off-site facilities for testing, which results in significant delays in determining the fuel quality, even to the extent that the fuel is consumed prior to acquiring the testing results. As such, when problems in the quality of the fuel are detected, only manual flow control systems can be actuated.
The current state-of-the art does not include any fuel quality control system that enables monitoring and management of fuel handling operations that allow the storage and monitoring of data within a plurality of subsystems.
The present invention provides improvements over the current state of the art and provides a monitoring and control system that may be completely unattended and allows for automatic fuel quality monitoring from a local and/or remote site without the requirement of an operator's intervention and which may automatically control the fuel flow based on the quality of the fuel.